Chicago's aldermen aren’t a threat to the Obama center. This lawsuit is.

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Oct 30, 2018 | 2:40 PM

A federal lawsuit filed by an environmental group, Protect Our Parks, argues that the Obama Presidential Center shouldn't be allowed at its proposed site in Jackson Park. (Image by DBOX for The Obama Foundation)

City Hall has been kind to the Obama Presidential Center. So far, the project has sailed through every Plan Commission and City Council vote. Another council vote is scheduled for Wednesday, when aldermen size up a “use agreement” that would allow the Obama Foundation to claim a corner of Jackson Park as the center’s campus.

After that likely passage, though, the project finds itself in a less friendly venue — the courtroom of U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey. Different arbiter, and the stakes are high.

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Blakey is presiding over a lawsuit filed by an environmental group, Protect Our Parks, which says the project should be booted away from Jackson Park because it’s being built by a private entity, the Obama Foundation, on public parkland. The group says that’s a violation of Chicago Park District code and state law.

The foundation would be in the clear, Protect Our Parks says, if it stuck with its original plan to make the center an official presidential library. Presidential libraries are managed by the National Archives and Records Administration, a government entity. A parkland transfer for a NARA-managed facility is fine. The same transfer to a private entity isn’t, the group says.

This case reminds us of the imbroglio over “Star Wars” creator George Lucas’ bid to build his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on a parking lot south of Soldier Field along the lakefront. Like the Obama center, that project was a private effort envisioned on public parkland. And at the core of both cases: a legal concept known as the public trust doctrine, which requires government to show — in essence — that it isn’t ceding control of certain protected public lands to private uses.

An organization called Friends of the Parks sued to stop Lucas. The case dragged on, and the filmmaker eventually took his project to Los Angeles. But a pretrial ruling by U.S. District Judge John Darrah foretold Lucas’ fate had he persisted with the idea. Darrah said the Lucas museum would not benefit the public but would instead “promote private and/or commercial interests.”

Though it’s tempting to see the Lucas saga as a template for the Obama center case, there are stark differences.

First, the Lucas museum would have been owned by the Lucas camp. The use agreement pending before the City Council calls for the Obama Foundation to turn over ownership of the campus and its buildings to the city once it’s all built. The foundation won’t get any tax-based funding for operating or capital expenditures. It also would pay for the upkeep of the campus.

Second, whatever public benefit the Lucas museum promised pales in comparison with what the Obama center offers. Much more than an homage to Barack Obama’s legacy, the center’s programming would include internships that forge future leaders and community organizers, as well as coding programs that would prepare South Side youths for an information technology-oriented economy. The campus would also house a new Chicago Public Library branch.

Will that be enough to satisfy the public trust doctrine litmus test? That’s for Blakey to decide. One thing’s clear, though. What would serve no one’s interest would be a court case needlessly delayed — one mired by stalling tactics, by endless continuances and foot-dragging. Lucas withdrew from Chicago not because the case was resolved against him, but because it didn’t conclude.

“Lingering’s not going to happen,” Blakey told the court at a hearing Oct. 24. Judge Blakey, we’ll hold you to that.